"Sudden" county ballots were there all along

By Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Where did those 10,000 King County votes come from?

That's the question that angry Republicans — and some pleasantly surprised Democrats — have been asking since county election officials announced Monday that they had 10,000 more votes left to count than initially estimated.

The additional ballots — from a heavily Democratic county — at least temporarily shifted the momentum of a race for the governor's office in which it appeared Republican Dino Rossi was increasingly likely to defeat Democrat Christine Gregoire. Instead, Gregoire wound up with a narrow lead on Monday.

King County election officials said Friday about 11,000 provisional and absentee ballots remained to be counted. Then on Monday, as the bulk of those votes were being counted, they raised the number to 21,000.

"That's a huge discrepancy," Rossi spokeswoman Mary Lane said. "We don't know what's going on there — where they came from and why all of a sudden these new numbers came out at the last minute."

So where did the votes come from?

They were there all along but no one had actually counted them, King County Elections Director Dean Logan said yesterday.

He said he became aware the projected count was wrong when his staff told him Monday that that day's count totaled nearly 17,000 votes.

Until Monday, the county's reports of the number of votes remaining to be counted were based on pre-election projections of voter turnout. Remaining votes were estimated by subtracting votes already counted from the projected vote.

When fewer voters showed up at the polls on Election Day, the county reduced its vote projection. "Ironically, we reduced it by about 10,000," Logan said.
 
In the end, the original projection was almost on target because the unprecedented turnout of absentee and provisional voters exceeded expectation. The percentage of provisional ballots found to be valid also was higher than expected.

"What has come to pass is not a mystery," Logan said. "It's not that there were missing ballots found. It's simply that the percentage of absentee ballots coming back far exceeded our projections."

As workers place sorted ballots in Postal Service trays stacked on wheeled shelves, a supervisor explained last week, they don't know how many ballots there are.

County officials don't have a system for counting absentee and provisional ballots. Instead, election workers are focused on checking whether the voter is registered and that his signature matches the signature on his registration card.

By last week, election officials might have realized their turnout projection was wrong — if they hadn't been focused on processing ballots and responding to a lawsuit filed Friday by the Democratic Party, Logan said.

After all the votes are certified, he said, he'll consider whether the county can improve the way it estimates the number of votes remaining to be counted.

But he doesn't expect to change his priorities.

"We have to stay above the political pingpong game," he said. "The campaigns are running the numbers and that's their job. Our job is to make sure that the election gets administered as accurately and efficiently as possible."

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com.